Bridging the functionalist and phenomenology-first approaches for the study of visual consciousness

When we are awake, we are constantly experiencing something, such as hearing traffic and seeing people on a busy street. Scientists have used two main methods to study our moment-to-moment experiences. One looks at what the brain is doing when we notice and report something. The other tries to investigate what the experience actually feels like for a person, and how the brain supports those feelings. While these two ideas are usually kept separate, this thesis shows that combining them together helps to find better ways to study what we experience and how it feels.